Buzz about Google Buzz
Google Buzz is a new service from Google. It’s goal is to make it easier to share with your (Google) contacts interesting short messages (a la Twitter), photos (a la Flickr), (YouTube) videos, feeds and probably much more (maybe as many sources as FriendFeed supports). All that spruced by your location, either when you’re posting, reading, or searching for relevant information. Once you give Google that “last” piece of the puzzle, your location, empowered by your search history Google already has - you can expect some highly relevant information or sweat dripping down your spine, depending on you love/hate relationship with Google.
Why does it Buzz so much?
Surely, Buzz looks like a great technological achievement. Maybe not as technically challenging and advanced as Google Wave, but surely much more mature, though time will tell.
Great aspect of Buzz service is how it aligns with other Google services - most prominently GMail, Google Latitude and Google Talk at this moment. Google has become over the years a hotbed for innovation giving birth to wide variety of interesting services (some very useful blockbusters, some failures) creating a platform used by many small, medium or large businesses - either relying or completely depending on the Google platform.
My Buzz on Buzz
My gut feeling tells me (buzzes to me) that Google Buzz marks the beginning of new era for Google where it’s using its own platform for creating synergy of services through cross-pollination and integration. As if billions of people aren’t depending on some Google services and (mostly without knowing) are contributing valuable usage search statistics back to Google teams crunching data and deciding what service to create next, what features to improve, what bottlenecks need to be scaled next. At the same time, Google is tapping into the valuable connections that have been already established. If you’ve been chatting with someone - you’re likely to continue communicating via Buzz. The same goes for people you’ve been emailing back and forth. Particularly so for your contacts with whom you’re sharing your physical location via Latitude. The list will surely soon include Google Voice.
Dissecting Buzz about Buzz
What may prove crucial to the success of Google Buzz are two important factors that go in its favor:
- Existing user base - your actual contacts are already registered in this Google Buzz social network. People you chat with are there. So are your email correspondents. Of course, people allowed to see where you are via Google Latitude - as well.
- Open standards - developers are crucial to the organic growth of a social network. They’re the ones paving the way for a social network to grow. Such growth is meaningful to humans, not the one in PowerPoint presentations or Excel yearly predictions or architectural blueprints. Buzz is based on open standards like Atom, ActivityStrea.ms, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, Social Graph API, Salmon Protocol, WebFinger.
- Resources and motivation - Google is known for its great working conditions. As for motivation for making Google Buzz the next blockbuster service, it’s not a secret anymore - Google wants to conquer the internet and index everything possible while trying to keep the public perception expression with their famous motto (“don’t be evil”).
Surely, Buzz API documentation will grow as more developers jump onto the bandwagon. Have in mind, open standards are even stronger than open-source projects as several such projects are spawn and evolutionary principles allow the best most useful code to survive.
Who are the people behind Buzz?
It’s worth noting the the young blood Google has recruited for its Social Web initiatives. There people are almost definitely engaged in Google Buzz project:
There are other people that will be involved with Google Buzz:
Do you know anyone else who’s missing here?
Final thoughts on Buzz
Another interesting fact to emphasize - Google Buzz is not just the first full-blown social networking service that was built inside Google (and not acquired like orkut or acquired and left to die like Dodgeball) but its much more. Buzz can become the hub for all data streams (realtime or not) on the internet, thus allowing Google to expand its reach beyond the search engine and ads, the main sources of Google revenue.
Dodgeball may be dead, but Buzz may be reincarnation of Jaiku.
As for Twitter and Facebook/FriendFeed - they’re must be thinking right now how to stay in the social networking game. Google Buzz probably spells openness and interoperability for Facebook, while Twitter will need to open up its streams of data unless it wants to watch its river go dry.
Buzz Trivia
Here’s Some trivia about the video. This is something interesting to someone from Serbia like myself: in the video, at 0:30 mark is an NY Times article about one of the most famous Serbian national meals - plljeskavica. This explains why I got hungry halfway through the video. :-P Thanks to Ćira from Google for the hint.
